Telecommunications companies now offer a wide variety of services to their customers, including providing digital content. Digital content includes applications, downloading and streaming media, and online purchases. At the same time that telecommunication companies are expanding to cover digital content, media companies offering digital content are now expanding to include telecommunications services. These companies, which have traditionally offered one of these products but now have expanded to include both, can be thought of as convergent companies.
Because digital content sales and services have often been managed separately from telecommunications sales and services, the data has also been managed separately. Although a single customer may have activity on both the telecommunications and digital content products lines in addition to other lines of the company's business like IPTV, the customer's activities and strategies for dealing with that customer would typically be handled in a segregated fashion. The different product lines of these convergent companies operate, in effect, as multiple distinct business entities rather than as a unified business.